The Magnificent Defense Unit of Dampier.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Comet December 40.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"Mike!"
It was Bill Porter's voice. I put one hand on the balustrade andvaulted into the garden. From behind a mass of shrubbery came sounds ofa struggle, and Bill's voice rose again.
"Mike, you ape! Step on it!"
I plowed through where someone had gone before. Bill, his shirtfrontawry, his coat-tails torn and muddy, was grappling with a snarling,kicking little man about half his size. As I burst out of theshrubbery, Bill kicked his legs from under him and they went down inthe newly spaded earth, Bill on top. Bill Porter weighs a good twohundred pounds. The struggle ended then and there.
Bill sat up, one fist clenched in the little man's shirt front. Heglared at me out of a rapidly closing eye.
"Where in blue blazes have you been?" he demanded. "D'you think Ilike wrestling with wildcats?"
I looked him over. "Didn't make out so well, did you? Lucky he wasn'tany bigger, or I would have had to help you. Why pick on a little guylike that? What's he done that you don't like?"
He pointed. Light from the reception hall fell through the bushes inirregular patches. In one of them, half buried in the scuffed-up dirt,I caught the glint of polished metal.
"Pick it up," Bill said.
It was a gun, bigger than the largest six-shooter ever toted by aHollywood buckaroo. It had a massive stock and the thickest barrel Ihad ever seen. The whole look of the thing was crazy, like somethingout of another world.
Bill had been scrambling around in the dirt. I saw that blood wasoozing from a gash in his neck. Before I could speak he held up a pieceof gleaming metal.
"Take a look at that," he said grimly. "That's what he wanted to pumpinto the Ambassador. Only I got it instead—in the neck. Now will yougive me a hand with this he-cat before he comes to and starts trying toskin me alive?"
I took the thing. It was a steel bolt or arrow of the kind once usedin cross-bows, sharpened to a needle point with six razor-edged vanesrunning back to the hilt. I slipped it into the chubby muzzle of thegun. It was a perfect fit.
"That," Bill told me, "is a solenoid-gun—one that works. You've seena metal core pop out of an electric coil when the juice is snapped on.It's a common laboratory stunt. Well, it's grown up and had pups, andthis is one of the nastiest of them. No noise at all—and does thatdart travel! It would go through a man like cheese even if he's asthick as His Magnificence yonder."
Through the open doors of the reception hall I could see the broadTeutonic back of Herr Wilhelm Friedrich Nebel, Ambassador from thenewly stabilized Middle-European Confederacy. Half the stuffed shirtsin Washington were crowded around him, trying to make themselves heardover the blare of the band and I recognized three of the President'sown private bodyguards. I knew that there were Secret Service menposted all over the grounds to forestall this very thing, yet in spiteof them this little man with the outlandish gun had crept within fiftyfeet of his goal. Had he picked them off, one by one, with his silentdarts?
The man was stirring. Bill had him now in a grip that would take morethan wildcat tactics to break. I parted the bushes so that a shaft oflight fell on his face. Surely I knew that forked beard, those piercingblack eyes, the shock of bristling hair. Suddenly I remembered. "Bill!It's Dampier!"
Pierre Dampier, France's greatest physici